


Love How You Want To Love (And Love Who You Please)

by elrhiarhodan



Series: The Wonder(ful) Years Verse [11]
Category: White Collar
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Coming Out, M/M, POV Original Character, POV Outsider, alternative universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-04
Updated: 2012-12-04
Packaged: 2017-11-20 07:29:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/582839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elrhiarhodan/pseuds/elrhiarhodan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s 1986 and Peter’s father looks back on a tragedy in his own life, a moment that shaped him into the man he is now.  He worries for his family, for his wife, his son, and yes - for Neal, too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love How You Want To Love (And Love Who You Please)

Joe couldn’t sleep. 

The opening strains of The Tonight Show theme drifted from the television in the family room. Cathy wouldn’t be coming to bed for at least another hour. While Joe was an early-to-bed, early-to-rise type of guy, he’d been married to a night owl for nearly twenty-five years. It suited them just fine, though. Cathy didn't work outside the home, but he had to be up by four am most days, particularly when he was working on a city job.

He loved his life. It was simple - he worked and provided for his wife and son. He had a good home and a good woman who loved him. She took no bullshit and loved him without reservation. Sometimes he wondered what he did to deserve everything he had. 

And Peter - a man couldn’t ask for a finer child, son _or_ daughter. He was everything a parent could hope for, smart and intelligent (two completely different things in his book), kind, generous, trustworthy. Someone to be proud of. If he still believed, he’d think that God had put a special blessing on Peter when he was born.

Joe rolled over and punched his pillow, the gentle sounds of the audience’s laughter was suddenly grating. He wished Cathy was in bed already. He needed her - just her presence would soothe his unquiet nerves. He could go down and join her, but she’d worry and he didn’t want to upset her.

Giving up on sleep for the moment, Joe turned on his bedside light and sat up. The room filled with shadows. He could read for a while, or do a crossword until sleep claimed him. But he knew that his sleeplessness wasn’t without cause, and no amount of reading or puzzle-solving was going to make a difference tonight.

He wasn’t a man who liked to keep secrets, but there was one he had kept nearly all his life. Cathy only knew that he had an older brother who died in his mid-twenties. In all the years of marriage, she never pried about his family. She never asked why he didn't talk about his childhood, why he had been so estranged from his father and mother, why he never spoke of his dead brother. Cathy just wrapped herself around him and filled in all of the empty spaces in his life with her love. 

And at this moment, despite his wife and his son, Joe felt completely alone. His brother James would have been sixty years old today, and he had been dead thirty five years longer than he had been alive. That simple mathematical fact hurt beyond measure. Joe was the only person alive who could remember him, and it had been thirty years since he spoke his own brother’s name.

He got up and went to the closet. He reached up, pushing aside the spare bedding, the bags with sweaters he’d never wear, and grabbed a box he had put there when they moved into this house when Peter was just an infant. A box he hadn’t touched since.

Inside were the only tangible memories of his childhood. A leather-cased picture of his grandparents, his elementary school diploma and a time-stained photograph album. He had rescued the album when his parents threw it out, much the way they had thrown his brother out - like so much trash.

Joe took a deep breath, to prepare himself for some terrible pain, and opened the album. It was filled with pictures of his brother - from birth until just before he was cut out of the family. Looking at the collection of mostly black and white snapshots, Joe was overcome with grief as fresh as the day he was told his brother was dead.

Turning through the pages was like stepping back in time - and wasn’t that just what a photograph was supposed to do? Summon long ago memories. 

Here was the picture of James holding his new born baby brother. Another picture of the two of them playing catch, another of James teaching him how to hold a baseball bat. Joe remembered this day - they were at the zoo and he had been afraid of the elephants, but James held his sweaty little hand tight and wouldn’t let anything happen to him.

And here was James and his best friend, Robbie. They were in their caps and gowns, graduating from high school, arms around each other’s shoulders. James had been Valedictorian, Robbie was Salutatorian. First and second, two peas in a pod, two sides of the same coin. Inseparable.

Joe had always been a tiny bit jealous of Robbie, but Robbie had always treated him with respect and affection, calling him the little brother he never had. Regardless of that smidge of jealously, Joe liked Robbie because James did. It was as simple as that.

They had even gone off to college together, to New York University. Robbie was pre-Med and James was studying architecture. There was a photograph of the two of them carrying their books and smiling at each other. Joe’s breath caught in his throat - the love there was clear.

There was one more photograph in the album, James’ graduation portrait. His heart skipped a beat. If he didn’t know better, he would have thought this was Peter. There was something about the shape of his brother’s mouth, that gentle half smile, that was also his son’s. He swallowed against the tears and turned the final page. No more photos, just a ragged-edged, yellowed newspaper article noting the death of James Burke, aged twenty-five, from injuries sustained in a mugging off of Bleeker Street on a hot August night in 1955.

“Hon? What’s the matter.” 

He had been looking at the album for so long he didn’t realize that it was after one in the morning. “Couldn’t sleep.” He didn’t make any effort to close the book on his lap. 

“That’s not like you.” Cathy took off her robe and sat down next to him. “Want to talk about it?”

Maybe another night Joe would have shrugged off his wife’s concern. Maybe he would have kissed her and made love to her, finding oblivion in her arms. Maybe he would have just turned off the light and tried to sleep. But tonight he couldn’t. Instead, he opened the album, not to the beginning, but to that picture of James and Robbie at NYU.

“This was my brother and his best friend.” He brushed a careful finger over the edge of the glossy photograph. “When he was twenty-one years old, he came home for Thanksgiving and told my parents that he was a homosexual. That he and Robbie were living together - not as best friends. But like man and wife.”

Cathy didn’t say anything, but she didn’t draw away.

“My father beat the crap out of him. Or tried to. James didn’t hit back, but he would only let him go so far. My mother screamed and cried and begged Jesus to strike her dead. My father said that no son of his was a goddamned fairy faggot.” Joe took a deep, shuddering breath. “And that was probably the least offensive thing. I was fourteen and I tried to stop them. They started on me - that I had to stay away from James, that he was going to molest me. That he had already done so - after all, I used to spend all my time with James and Robbie when they were home. My father threw James out the door and said that as far as he was concerned, James Andrew Burke had never been born, never existed and his name would never be spoken in this house again. He still made a success of himself - until some bigot thought that it would be fun to take a pipe to the head of some queer.”

He finally turned to look at his wife. The tears he didn’t allow himself to cry were streaming down her face. “Oh, Joe - I am so sorry.”

“Why - why are you sorry? Because my brother was gay?” He had to know. Cathy’s answer could break his world apart.

She raised a loving hand to his face, her palm - soft and warm - curving around his clenched jaw. “I am sorry that you lost your brother, sorry that your parents did that to him, to you. I am not sorry that your brother was gay.”

Her gentleness, her deep compassion cracked the protective shell he had built, it shattered the chains of control and denial that held everything in. “I loved my brother, I didn’t care that he was gay - queer - a homosexual. That didn’t matter. He was my _brother_ and I loved him.” Joe’s voice broke, his heart broke. Cathy’s arms wrapped around him, and he buried his head in her neck as great, aching sobs of long-buried grief wracked him.

“Shh, shh.” Cathy held him and didn’t let go until the storm passed.

Joe lifted his head and met his wife’s eyes. There was something else he needed to tell his wife, another secret - one he’d been keeping for a while, one that could devastate them all. “I think Peter’s like James. And Neal is his Robbie.” The declaration was quiet, a stark contrast to the earlier drama. He waited for her outrage, her denial.

It didn’t come. “I think I’ve known for a while, too. I just … didn’t see. Didn’t want to see it.”

Joe hated the hesitancy in her voice. “Cath - I love you, but I will not allow you to cut Peter out of our lives. I will not allow you to do to him what my parents did to James.” He squeezed her hands, hoping against hope that she would agree with him.

She finally spoke, the words ringing like bells. “Peter is my son, whatever he chooses to be. I would never stop loving him.” 

The weight he had been carrying for so many months lifted and he hugged Cathy, held onto her, pressing a kiss against her head. “Thank you.”

She struggled a bit, breaking out of his hold. “Joseph Burke - you really thought I’d turn on our son?”

He didn’t answer. 

“I guess I should be angry about that - I thought you knew me better. But …” She laid a hand on the photograph album, “I can understand why you might have thought otherwise.”

Joe scrubbed at his face. “There’s a guy on one of my crews - he likes to brag about beating up the queers and fags, and how they are all going to die from AIDS. I fired him today. I couldn’t stand it anymore. The hate, though - it’s everywhere. I am so terrified for Peter - for Neal. For both of them.”

“I wouldn’t have wished this for our son, for anyone’s child.” Joe felt a little outraged at that, but Cathy put a finger against his lips, shushing him. “Let me finish - not because being gay is wrong or evil. I’ve never thought that.”

Joe relaxed.

“But it’s a difficult thing to be so different. It’s always going to be a struggle for them. They want to be FBI agents - who ever heard of a gay FBI agent?” She paused and laughed. “Well maybe except Hoover, of course.” But her joke didn’t break the tension. "It’s going to be so hard for Peter, for Neal - with their career choices, with everything they want to do - to make of themselves. They are always going to have to hide themselves. To lie to other people, people who don’t want to see them as they are.” 

“We’ll help them, Cathy. They will know that we love and accept them, right? That they don’t have to lie to us, that they don’t need to keep it a secret from us.”

She smiled, “Yes, Joe. We’re there for both of them. Neal’s as much ours as Peter’s. We’ll do what ever we need to to make them happy and safe.”

Joe looked at her in wonder. “How did I get so lucky?” As much as he had dreamed that Cathy wouldn’t turn on Peter, he hadn’t allowed himself to hope that she would give him such unconditional acceptance.

“We’re shaped by our experiences, my love.”

“I know what shaped mine, but yours?” He thought he knew everything about his wife, but there was nothing that would suggest that she had any experience like this.

“My oldest brother, Tommy.”

“Tommy’s not gay, Cath. He’s got a wife and four kids.” Something occurred to him. “Unless he’s leading a double life?”

“No - Tommy’s not gay. But he went to Montgomery, he was in Birmingham. He believed - he _believes_ in civil rights for everyone, black or white. I remember when he came home after the riots in Montgomery, he’d been beaten up and my mother begged him to stop. He said he couldn’t - not until everyone in America could walk into any public place and be treated equally. He didn’t become a lawyer to become rich - he wanted and still wants to help people”

Joe had always known that Cathy’s eldest brother was a good man. “Do you think he would think the same thing about homosexuals?”

“He already does. He’s been providing pro bono legal support to the gay community in New York since the Sixties.”

“Why didn’t I know this?” 

She shrugged. “Don’t know - it’s just not something that comes up in conversation.” She leaned against him and suddenly all Joe wanted to do was get under the covers and hold her in his arms. So he did just that. He reached out and turned off the light, and Cathy snuggled against him.

“The boys will be home in a few weeks. What do you want to do?” 

“Whatever we have to to make sure they know we love them, Joe. Isn’t that the most important thing of all? We could tell them that we know, and that it changes nothing for us.”

He held her, loved her and again wondered how he got so lucky.

__

FIN


End file.
